El Paso Corp. and Duke Energy will be the “clear, immediate winners” as energy traders scramble for their survival on Wall Street, but embattled Williams and Dynegy will be a “jumpball because of the liquidity trap they have gotten themselves into,” says energy industry analyst John Olson of Houston-based Sanders Morris Harris.

While there will be survivors to the current bloodbath, he noted that being an energy marketer and trader in today’s market is the “functional equivalent of having leprosy, herpes, AIDS and brain tumors all at once.”

Olson said he neither hopes Dynegy nor Williams, which have seen their stocks plunge to the near-penny stock level and face severe liquidity problems, will descend into bankruptcy. But he conceded it’s a possibility “with the stocks trading where they are,” and given the fact that Dynegy and Williams have not cut back their trading operations “enough to satisfy Wall Street.”

If they want to maintain big trading operations, “a pre-packaged bankruptcy would be an option,” Olson said.

Investors are fleeing the stocks of energy companies with trading operations, he noted, adding they’re “saying, ‘Who needs this?'” Olson said Sandy Weill, chairman and CEO of Citcorp, remarked Tuesday that he wished he had never heard of Enron Corp., whose bankruptcy, accounting irregularities and questionable trading practices touched off the crisis among energy traders.

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